The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel

"I do mean it," he said, as they went up a high, narrow stoop together, and saw two slim, lit windows loom before them.

"I hope I am not responsible for this last change of faith in you," she answered, while Kindelon was ringing the bell.

"Well," he at once said, "I believe you are. There is no kind of real society here except one. Mind you, I don't say this in any but the most dispassionate and critical way. And I'm not glad to say it, either; I'm sorry, in fact. But it is true" – And then, after a second of silence, he repeated – "no kind of society except one."

Pauline smiled as she watched him, but there was both exasperation and challenge in the smile.

"What kind is that?" she queried.

"Ask your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie," he replied.

Pauline gave an irritated sigh. As she did so the door of Mrs. Dares's house was opened by a spruce-looking young negress, and they both passed into the little limited hall beyond. Tapestries of tasteful design were looped back from the small doors which gave upon the hall. Their blended stuffs of different colors produced a novel effect, wholly disproportioned to the real worth of the fabrics themselves. The deft skill of Mrs. Dares's younger daughter was responsible, not alone for these, but for other equally happy embellishments throughout this delightful miniature dwelling. In every chamber there was to be found some pretty decorative stratagem whereby a maximum of graceful and even brilliant ornamentation had been won from a minimum of pecuniary expense. Pauline's eye had swept too many costly objects of upholstery not to recognize that a slender purse had here gone with a keen artistic sense. The true instinct of beauty seemed never to err, and its constant accompaniment of simplicity in the way of actual material lent it a new charm. Screen, rug, panelling, mantel-cover, tidy, and chair-cushion took for her a quick value because of their being wrought through no luxurious means. It was so easy to buy all these things in velvet, in silk, in choice woods; it was so hard, so rare, to be able to plan them all from less pretentious resources. Before she had been five minutes in Mrs. Dares's abode, Pauline found herself affected by the mingled attractiveness and modesty of its details, as we are allured by the tints, contours, and even perfumes of certain wildflowers which glow only the more sweetly because of their contrast with cultured blooms.

Mrs. Dares herself had a look not unlike that of some timid little wildflower. She was short of stature and very fragile; Kindelon's past accounts of her incessant accomplishments took the hue of fable as Pauline gazed upon her. She was extremely pale, with large, warm, dark eyes set in a face of cameo-like delicacy. Her dress hung in folds about her slight person, as if there had been some pitying motive in the looseness of its fit. But she wore it with an air of her own. It was a timid air, and yet it was one of ease and repose. The intelligence and earnestness of her clear-cut face gave her an undeniable dignity; you soon became sure that she was wholly unassuming, but you as soon realized that this trait of diffidence had no weakness in mind or character for its cause. It seemed, in truth, to correspond with her bodily frailty, and to make her individualism more complete while none the less emphatic. The personality that pushes itself upon our heed does not always make us notice it the quickest. Mrs. Dares never pushed herself upon anybody's heed, yet she was seldom unnoticed. Her voice rarely passed beyond a musical semitone, and yet you rarely failed to catch each word it uttered. Pauline not only caught each word, as her new hostess now stood and addressed her, leaving for the time all other guests who were crowding the rather meagre apartments, but she tacitly decided, as well, that there was an elegance and purity in the expressions used by this notable little lady which some of the grander-mannered dames whom she had intimately known might have copied with profit. One peculiarity about Mrs. Dares, however, was not slow to strike her: the pale, delicate face never smiled. Not that it was melancholy or even uncheerful, but simply serious. Mrs. Dares had no sense of humor. She could sometimes say a witty thing that bit hard and sharp, but she was without any power to wear that lazier mental fatigue-dress from which some of the most vigorous minds have been unable, before hers, to win the least relaxation. This was probably the true reason why her small drawing-room often contained guests whose eccentricity of garb or deportment would otherwise have excluded them from her civilities. She could not enjoy the foibles of her fellow-creatures; she was too perpetually busy in taking a grave view of their sterner and more rational traits. She found something in nearly everybody that interested her, and it always interested her because it was human, solemn, important – a part, so to speak, of the great struggle, the great development, the great problem. This may, after all, be no real explanation of why she never smiled; for a smile, as we know, can hold the sadness of tears in its gleam, just as a drop of morning dew will hold the moisture of the autumn rainfall. But the absence of all mirthful trace on her gentle lips accorded, nevertheless, with the inherent sobriety of her nature, and they who got to know her well would unconsciously assign for both a common origin.

"My dear Mrs. Varick," she said to Pauline, "I am very glad that you chose to seek my poor hospitality this evening. Mr. Kindelon has already prophesied that we shall be good friends, and as I look at you I find myself beginning to form a most presumptuous certainty that he will not prove a false prophet. He tells me that you are weary of the fashionable world; I have seen nothing of that, myself, though I fancy I know what it is like. – A great Castle of Indolence, I mean, where there are many beautiful chambers, but where the carpets yield too luxuriously under foot, and the couches have too inviting a breadth. Now, in this little drawing-room of mine you will meet few people who have not some daily task to perform – however ill many of us may accomplish it. In that way the change will have an accent for you – the air will be fresher and more tonic, though shifting from warm to chilly in the most irregular manner. I want to warn you, my dear lady, that you will miss that evenness of temperature which makes such easy breathing elsewhere. Be prepared for a decided atmospheric shock, now and then: but you will find it rather stimulating when it arrives, and by no means unwholesome."

Pauline could scarcely repress her astonishment at this very original speech of welcome. She and Mrs. Dares were separated from all other occupants of the room while it was being delivered; Kindelon had moved away after making his two friends known to each other, and doubtless with the intention of letting his hostess stand or fall on her own conversational merits, as far as concerned the first impression which Pauline should receive from her. But this impression was one in which admiration and approval played quite as strong a part as surprise. Pauline had wanted just such a spur and impetus as her faculties were now receiving; she kept silent for a few brief seconds, in silent enjoyment of the complex emotions which Mrs. Dares had wakened. Then she said, with a low laugh that had not the least suspicion of frivolity, —

"If it is a social temperature with those barometric tricks and freaks, Mrs. Dares, I promise you that I shan't catch cold in it. But I fear Mr. Kindelon has wasted too many premonitory words upon me. He should have politely allowed me to betray myself, as a specimen of harmless and humble commonplace. I am sure to do it sooner or later."

"Oh, he has told me of your aim, your purpose," said Mrs. Dares.

Pauline colored, and laid one hand on the lady's slender arm. "Then we are rivals, I suppose?" she murmured, with an arch smile.

Mrs. Dares turned and looked at her guest before answering; there was a mild, dreamy comprehensiveness in the way she seemed to survey their many shapes, letting her large, soft, dusky eyes dwell upon no special one of them. A little later she regarded Pauline again. She now shook her head negatively before replying.

"Oh, no, no," she said. "What you see here is not in any sense a representative assemblage. I have often wished that some one would establish a stricter and more definite standard than mine. We need it sadly. There are no entertainments given in New York where the mentally alert people – those who read, and think, and write – can meet with an assurance that their company has been desired for reasons of an exceptional personal valuation. The guest without the wedding-garment is always certain to be there. I fear that I have paid too little heed to the wedding-garment; my daughters – and especially my eldest daughter, Martha – are always telling me that, in various ways. – Oh, no, Mrs. Varick, we shall not be rivals. You will have the leisure to sift, to weigh, to admit or exclude, to label, to indorse, to classify – to make order, in short, out of chaos. This I have never had the leisure to do." She looked at Pauline with an almost pensive gravity. Then she slowly repeated the word, "Never."

"I fancy you have never had the cruelty," said Pauline.

"There would be considerable solid mercy in it," was the firm answer.

"Yes. To those who were both called and chosen. But how about the repulsed candidates for admission?"

"They would deserve their defeat," said Mrs. Dares, with thoughtful deliberation. "Morals and manners properly combined would be their sole passport."

"And ability," amended Pauline.

"Ability? Oh, they all have ability who care to mingle night after night where that qualification is the dominating necessity for mutual enjoyment. Remember, an organized literary and intellectual society would not demand what that other society, of which you have seen so much, imperatively demands. I mean wealth, position, modishness, ton. All these would go for nothing with an aristocracy of talent, of high and true culture, of progress, of fine and wise achievement in all domains where human thought held rule. There, gross egotism, priggishness, raw eccentricity, false assumption of leadership, facile jealousy, dogmatic intolerance – these, and a hundred other faults, would justly exert a debarring influence."

Pauline did not know how her cheeks were glowing and her eyes were sparkling as she now quickly said, after having swept her gaze along the groups of guests not far away.

"And this is what you call making order out of chaos? Ah, yes, I understand. It is very delightful to contemplate. It quite stirs one with ambition. It is like having the merciless and senseless snobbery of mere fashionable life given a reasonable, animating motive. I should like to take upon myself such a task." Here she suddenly frowned in a moderate but rather distressed way. "Not long ago," she went on, "Mr. Kindelon told me that I would find no literary society in New York. But I contested this point. I'm inclined to contest it still, though you have shaken my faith, I admit."

"The word 'literary' is very specializing," said Mrs. Dares. She had drooped her large, musing eyes.

"Do you mean that for an evasion?" asked Pauline with a tart pungency that she at once regretted as almost discourteous. "Allow," she went on, promptly softening her tone, "that the word does cover a multitude of definitions as I use it – that it is used faute de mieux, and that no society has ever existed anywhere which one could call strictly literary. Come, then, my dear Mrs. Dares, allowing all this, do you consider that Mr. Kindelon was right? Is it all chaos to-day in New York? Is there no gleam of order?" And here Pauline broke into a furtive tremor of laughter. "Must I begin my good work at the very earliest possible beginning if I am to commence at all?"

Mrs. Dares's dark eyes seemed to smile now, if her lips did not. "Yes," she said. "Mr. Kindelon was right. You are to begin at the very beginning. – In London it is so different," she went on, lapsing into the meditative seriousness from which nothing could permanently distract her. "I spent a happy and memorable month there not many years ago. It was a delicious holiday, taken because of overwork here at home, and a blessed medicine I found it. I had brought with me a few lucky letters. They opened doors to me, and beyond those doors I met faces and voices full of a precious welcome. You would know the names of not a few of those who were gracious to me; they are names that are household words. And there, in London, I saw, strongly established, a dignified, important and influential society. Rarely, once in a while, I met some man or woman with a title, but he or she had always either done something to win the title, or something – if it was inherited – to outshine it. I did not stay long enough to pick flaws, to cavil; I enjoyed and appreciated – and I have never forgotten!"

Just at this point, and somewhat to Pauline's secret annoyance, Kindelon returned with a lady at his side. Pauline was soon told the lady's name, and as she heard it her annoyance was swiftly dissipated by a new curiosity. She at once concluded that Miss Cora Dares bore very slight resemblance to her mother. She was taller, and her figure was of a full if not generous moulding. Her rippled chestnut hair grew low over the forehead; almost too low for beauty, though her calm, straight-featured face, lit by a pair of singularly luminous blue eyes, and ending in a deep-dimpled chin of exquisite symmetry, needed but a glance to make good its attractive claim. Miss Cora Dares was quite profuse in her smiles; she gave Pauline, while taking the latter's hand, a very bright and charming one, which made her look still less like her mother.

"We saw you and mamma talking very earnestly together, Mrs. Varick," she said, with a brief side-glance toward Kindelon, "and so we concluded that it would be safe to leave you undisturbed for at least a little while. But mamma is curiously unsafe as an entertainer." This was said with an extremely sweet and amiable look in Mrs. Dares's direction. "She sometimes loses herself in gentle rhapsodies. My sister Martha and I have to keep watch upon her by turns, out of pity for the unliberated victims."

"I need not tell you how I scorn the injustice of that charge, my dear Mrs. Dares!" here cried Kindelon. "It would be late in the day to inform you of my devoted admiration!"

"I fear it is early in the day for me to speak of mine," said Pauline; but the laugh that went with her words (or was it the words themselves?) rang sincerely, and took from what she said the levity of mere idle compliment.

"But you will surely care to meet some of our friends, Mrs. Varick," now said Cora Dares.

"Oh, by all means, yes!" exclaimed Pauline. The girl's limpid, steadfast eyes fascinated her, and she gazed into their lucent depths longer than she was perhaps aware. It was almost like an abrupt awakening to find that she and Mrs. Dares's youngest daughter were standing alone together, Kindelon and the elder lady having gone. "I want very much to meet many of your friends," Pauline proceeded. She put her head a little on one side, while her lips broke into a smile that her companion appeared to understand perfectly and to answer with mute, gay intelligence. "I suppose you have heard all about me and my grand project, just as your charming mother has heard, Miss Dares?"

"Oh, yes," returned Cora.

"And you think it practicable?"

"I think it praiseworthy."

"Which means that I shall fail."

Cora looked humorously troubled. "If you do, it will not be your fault. I am not doubtful on that point."

"Your mother has by no means encouraged me. She says that I must be careful in my selections, but she gives me very little hope of finding many worthy subjects to select. She seems to think that when the wheat has been taken from the tares, as it were, there will be very little wheat left."

"Yes, I know mamma's opinions. I don't quite share them. My sister Martha does, however, thoroughly. – Ah, here is Martha now. Let me make you acquainted."

Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person, and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the classic type. Pauline at once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute sting.

"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her sister had been presented.

"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"

"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are all three so different."

"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling, arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes – for I'm a school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become of her if it were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr. Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr. Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"

"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.

She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness, but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.

She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable. She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.

"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora. Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs. Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"

"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.

"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.

"You mean – ?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could scarcely have explained.

"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."

"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.

"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than usual. "We do."

Pauline bowed assent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or yourself?"

Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything. I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."

"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent amusement. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.

But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do you think I shall succeed in it?"

Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.

VII

Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability to become their future leader.

She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment. She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.

"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I should have gone on the stage and played Juliet if it hadn't been for my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as it were."

"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed," the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with the discords of daily life about one."

"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr. Prawle," said Pauline.

"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond, with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a viper. He should have lived with me in the Quartier Latin; he should have read, studied and loved the divine Théophile Gautier – most perfect of all French poets!"

The speaker fixed his sleepy blue eyes upon Leander Prawle while he thus spoke. A slight smile touched his lips, leaving a faint dimple in either smooth oval cheek. He was certainly very handsome, in an unconventional, audacious way. His collar gave a lower glimpse of his firm yet soft throat than usage ordinarily sanctions; the backward wave of his hair was certainly against any conceded form. He had been made known to Pauline as Mr. Arthur Trevor, and she had felt surprised at his name being so English; she had expected to find it French; Mr. Trevor had appeared to her extremely French.

"When you speak of Paris and of Gautier," she now said to him, "you really relieve me, Mr. Trevor. I was so prepared, on first meeting you, to find that you were not an American."

"Oh, Trevor is very French," said Leander Prawle coldly.

Trevor laughed, lifting one hand, on the middle finger of which was the tawny tell-tale mark of the confirmed cigarette-smoker.

"And my friend, Prawle," he said, "is enormously English."

"Not English – American," slowly corrected Leander Prawle.

"It is the same thing!" cried Arthur Trevor. "He is cold-blooded, Mrs. Varick," the young gentleman continued, with emphasis and a certain excitement. "We are always fighting, Prawle and I. I tell Prawle that in his own beloved literature, he should have but one model outside of Shakespeare. That is Keats – the sweet, sensuous, adorable Keats."

"I loathe Keats," said Leander Prawle, as if he were repeating some fragment of a litany. "I think him a word-monger."

"Aha," laughed Arthur Trevor, showing his white, sound teeth, "Keats was an immense genius. He knew the art of expression."